John Muir Laws

Naturalist, educator and artist John (Jack) Muir Laws delights in exploring the natural world and sharing this love with others. He has worked as an environmental educator for over 25 years in California, Wyoming, and Alaska. He teaches classes on natural history, conservation biology, scientific illustration, and field sketching. His most recent book, The Laws Guide to the Sierra Nevada, is an illustrated field guide to more than 1,700 species of plants and animals and is beautifully illustrated with 2,710 original watercolor paintings. This comprehensive and easy to use guide allows botanists to identify the insects that come to their flowers, birders to identify the trees in which the birds perch, or hikers to identify the stars overhead at night. He is trained as a wildlife biologist and is an associate of the California Academy of Sciences. His illustrations capture the feeling of the living plant or animal, while also including details critical for identification. In the summer of 2004, Laws published Sierra Birds: a Hiker's Guide. He is also a regular contributor to Bay Nature magazine with his "Naturalists Notebook" column. He is currently coordinating efforts to create a curriculum to tie the field guide to the State of California education standards and secure funding to donate sets of field guides to every elementary and high school in the Sierra Nevada and teaching field sketching and natural history classes throughout the state.